February 12, 2025
Business

Buy firewood early Mainers’ move toward alternative heating source increases demand

Many homeowners aren’t just worried about how high their heating oil costs will go during the next season; they are downright frightened, firewood dealer Doug Thomas of Ripley said this week.

“They are scared. When I deliver their firewood for the winter, there is an overwhelming sense of relief,” Thomas said.

Frustrated with staggering heating oil bills, many Mainers have converted or are returning to wood heat. Some are making a complete shift while others are bringing in long-unused wood stoves from the garage or basement to augment their current systems.

The traditional Maine summer sounds of wind in the pines or waves crashing on the coast may soon be replaced with the grinding of backyard chain saws and the thwack of a splitting maul.

“The demand for firewood is going up and it’s just beginning,” Thomas said. He has logged wood for 35 years and sold firewood for the past nine years, and he said he has never seen such a demand. He sells up to 2,000 cords of wood a year and expects to nearly double that this season.

“We usually have 100 cord of wood set aside at this time of the year,” he said. “We have less than 20. Seasoned wood is going to be scarce as hens’ teeth. We are booking orders ahead for a month when we used to be able to fill them in two to three days.”

Thomas said that customers who traditionally bought two to three cords of wood are now ordering five to six cords.

Although this move toward wood has been a boon for Maine’s firewood dealers, they are also feeling the pinch of higher fuel costs and are warning consumers to buy their wood supplies early this year.

This is only Rick Lemon’s second year selling firewood at Four Seasons Firewood in Searsmont, but he is already being squeezed between how much consumers can pay and how much tree-length logs cost him.

“I just put my price up to $225, green, from $195 last month,” he said. “The idea of going over $200 a cord, well, I didn’t like it but I had to.” Lemon said the cost of the tree-length wood he purchases has risen by 20 percent this year.

Firewood dealers typically buy their wood supply from loggers and then cut it to length and split it. It is usually sold by the cord, which is a stack of wood 4 feet wide by 4 feet high by 8 feet long.

“All those [loggers] use fuel, too,” he said. “If fuel keeps rising, in another month I’ll be forced to go up on my price again.”

Thomas said he wouldn’t quote a price, basically because “I don’t know what it will be on almost a daily basis. Every time I go to buy [tree-length logs], it costs more.”

Substantial savings

It isn’t complicated to figure out how much consumers can save by using wood to heat their homes. The Pellet Fuel Institute, based in Virginia, is a nonprofit agency serving the pellet fuel industry. On its Web site, www.pelletfuel.org, there is a fuel calculator that, once current prices are plugged in, will compare the heating costs of wood, pellets, oil, natural gas, coal, electricity and propane for homeowners.

As a rule of thumb, a 2-ton cord of hardwood yields about the same usable heat as 200 gallons of heating oil, a ton of hard coal, or about 4,000 kilowatts of electricity.

For example, 200 gallons of No. 2 fuel oil was averaging $4.50 a gallon this week, or $900, according to this week’s prices at www.maineoil.com. The same usable heat from wood would cost $225 for an overall savings of $675. Those who cut and split their own wood save even more.

Here’s how to calculate the costs and savings for an entire heating season: A hundred gallons of home heating oil generates roughly 14 million BTUs of heat. A cord of hardwood generates about 21 million BTUs of heat. Using that formula and this week’s average oil prices, if a home uses 1,200 gallons of heating oil over a winter, it would cost $4,500 to heat at $4.50 a gallon.

To generate the same amount of heat with wood, a homeowner would need to purchase eight cords of wood.

At the average of $225 a cord, the wood would cost about $1,800. The estimated savings, therefore, would be about $3,600.

Chris McManus of Columbia Falls is a fisherman in the summer and a logger in the winter. He sells only tree-length logs for $125 to $130 for 5,000 pounds, which is not a full cord. “My customers all have chain saws and prefer to cut it up themselves,” he said. “But the same people that I served last year are shopping around this year, trying to get the best deal.”

All debates regarding renewable or replaceable resources aside, firewood sales are going through the roof.

“I just received a check from a woman who wants her wood delivered in September,” Thomas said, adding: “Order your wood now. Even if you can’t get all that you think you will need, at least get some.”

bdnpittsfield@verizon.net

487-3187

Correction: 06/06/2008

A story on Page C1 of the May 31 newspaper about wood heat sources contained an error. The correct name for the nonprofit organization dealing with pellets is The Pellet Fuels Institute.

06/04/2008

An article on firewood supplies published on Page C1 on Saturday, May 31, identified a resource incorrectly. The correct Web site is www.pelletheat.org.


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